Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,55
had been with Zita, she supposed, but she was the one here now. She drank coffee from a translucent china cup and spread sweet, golden butter on a warm, floury scone. They walked up Nerudova Street toward the castle and then turned around and walked across the Charles Bridge. In the Old Town, Miklós photographed her in front of the cubist House of the Black Madonna, in Celetná Street. He kept looking at his watch and saying they should be on their way, and then he remembered another little street he wanted to walk up, another building he had to see, and then there was a bookshop he had to visit. At the Café Montmartre they drank cold lemonade and then walked on the Charles Bridge, where a little boy nearly ran into Natalia. She put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. He looked up at her, startled. Blue eyes beneath a fringe of blond hair. For a moment, she thought he was Franz, Dr. Schaefferová’s son. He wasn’t; his mother took his hand and said, “Jan, you must not run away from me like that.”
Chapter Ten
Magdolna put down a long-handled spoon she was using to stir a galvanized pot of black dye in which floated one of the countess’s gowns. Katya ran to summon the countess, who then appeared, leaning on Katya’s arm. She looked at Natalia and said, “My God, you are here at last. Sit down, why don’t you, and we can have a good talk.” Magdolna left the dress to soak, and they sat at the kitchen table, the three of them, and Katya poured coffee into translucent white cups, and after a while Rozalia said it was a shame to be indoors, and she and Natalia moved to the garden. Rozalia walked without a cane or any assistance and sat very upright in the garden chair, bringing Natalia up to date on the life of the estate. She talked about the excellent crops of wheat and corn, the warm weather—God willing it would stay fine and not turn wet before the harvest was finished. She had hired Guido to make repairs to the school. A new stove had been put in, and the windows sealed to keep out drafts, a shelf’s length of new books ordered from a bookshop in Budapest. Miklós had helped her select the books. He had hung the picture of the blessed King Karl of Hungary back up on the wall after he’d finished painting. Rozalia said she would take Natalia to see it after she had unpacked and settled in.
A few days later, Miklós drove to Budapest for a meeting with a German-language newspaper publisher. At about eight in the evening Natalia was reading in the library when she heard the Bugatti on the gravel drive. Time went by, then Miklós appeared at the door. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s someone in the kitchen I want you to meet.”
This someone was a puppy, a puli, three months old, with a coat of corkscrew curls, white in color, coal-black eyes, a fat black nose. She knelt, and the puppy licked her face. “He knows you already,” Miklós said. “He obeys you.”
“He obeys no one,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. The puppy wiggled around ecstatically on the floor.
“Think of a name for him,” Miklós said. “He’s your dog.”
“Mine?” she said. “How can he be mine? I will be leaving soon, and I can’t take him with me, can I? Benno would never forgive me.” But she gave him a name: Bashan, in honor of the dog in the story “A Man and His Dog,” by Thomas Mann. “Hmm. A literary name, for such a small dog,” Miklós said.
Bashan followed her everywhere and slept at the foot of her bed. Rozalia said she would catch a disease from him. He has no germs, Natalia insisted, although he had his fair share of fleas, which she had to comb out of his ringlets and drown one at a time in a bowl of soapy water. She hand-fed him bits of cooked meat from the dinner platter.
“For God’s sake, he’s only a dog,” the countess said, but she too succumbed and praised Bashan immoderately and gave him bowls of warm milk.
On his walks, Bashan frolicked, barking his excited, high-pitched bark. Natalia took off his leash, and he immediately jumped into the river and refused to come out when she called.